After the Fall

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Will to Art on 1 January 2015. It should be noted that, since 1 November 2014, all Art's emails have originated from Farthington's account.



I love all the new show ideas, and July 4th could be doable for me if it would be possible to work out as much as we can virtually and split rehearsals between TC and Lansing or a midpoint.

Here's what the Fourth of July concert evokes for me:

A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw:
It was an Abyssinian maid
And on her dulcimer she played,
Singing of Mount Abora.
Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song,
To such a deep delight ’twould win me,
That with music loud and long,
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome! those caves of ice!
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.

What if is ambiguous whether this show is even a show?

What if the performance is Arthur's attempt to "build that dome in air"?

Maybe the show is Arthur struggling through a lifetime of conflicts in a moment? It could be as authentically 1976 as 2015 and every other year.

I'm reminded of a clip of an avant garde 60's Hamlet in which Hamlet stood in the center of all the characters of the play who danced and moaned and writhed around him. Really, what I'm talking about is a second in a series of Evenings with Arthur White. We can communicate a lot about the character without spelling out much, and it could have the ballet elements you discussed. The mascot could evolve throughout the show, and the scrubs could fade in and out of other costumes. At least Father and I could handle costume shifts.

We've had debates about the setting of the Concert for Iceland. Maybe the Concert has somehow become Arthur's dome in air: a type of metaphysical battleground he must properly order for reasons he doesn't fully comprehend.

Maybe Arthur Miller's After the Fall would work as a template.